An EU funded project aims to upgrade, improve and integrate major research infrastructures in Europe

Advertisement

A four-year project to upgrade Europe’s particle physics infrastructure, and widen access to researchers in more than 80 institutes and research laboratories in 23 countries, gets off the ground this week.

Advanced European Infrastructures for Detectors at Accelerators, (AIDA) a Euro 26 million project - with Euro 8 million coming from the EU’s FP 7 Research Infrastructures programme - aims to upgrade, improve and integrate key European research infrastructures and develop advanced detector technologies for future particle accelerators, in line with the European Strategy for Particle Physics.

These include the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) upgrade, Linear Collider, Neutrino facilities and Super-B factories In addition, European researchers from outside the project will benefit from EU funding to access AIDA test beams and irradiation facilities. The project is coordinated by CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research.

While this infrastructure is critical to basic research in the field, the technology used in particle detectors has also been transferred to areas such as medical imaging. Positron Emission Tomography, Computer Tomography X-ray scanners and other X-ray imaging devices have been developed from technology originally developed for particle detectors.

Detector technology is also being applied to radioactive waste monitoring and for security scanning in transport. Part of AIDA’s brief is to work closely with industry to develop new technology to lead to new applications.